really deleting an nnimap message

really deleting an nnimap message

[marklar]

Hi,

I'm using emacs22 with nnimap, and am having trouble fully deleting a
message.

I will describe the problem below, and would like to know what it is
that I need to understand about gnus to know why it is behaving the
way it is and how to fix it.

Here is what happens:
I delete a message with B-del or what have you
I quite gnus and restart, and reenter the inbox
I type /o to see all the old articles
Apparently ALL of the emails I have every downloaded using nnimap show
up.

Most of them have been deleted before.
Given one of these deleted emails, I find that the message is not
being stored on the server side anymore.
However, I do find that the message is being stored in ~/News/agent/
nnimap/myaccount/INBOX

When I say that the message is being stored, I just mean that there a
record of the email in ~/News/agent/nnimap/myaccount/INBOX/.overview
that is being used to display the message in the summary buffer.

When I press enter to read the message, it gets marked with a G, and
the body is not displayed, given that it's not stored on the server.
When I try to delete the message with B-del, it tells me that the
article can't be deleted.

I wouldn't mind this so much if it stayed marked G all the time and I
could /NG<enter> and be done with it every time I enter the mail box,
but depending on the various ways that I exit the program or what have
you (I haven't discovered what all causes what yet) the message shows
up marked with variously an O or a . or some such thing, and now I
have over a thousand messages to manually visit to discover which ones
are real in order to clean my mail box.

Thanks,

marklar

Re: really deleting an nnimap message

[Tassilo Horn]

marklar <markprice@gmail.com> writes:

Hi Marklar,

> I'm using emacs22 with nnimap, and am having trouble fully deleting a
> message.

I think that's your problem:

,----[ (info "(gnus)IMAP") ]
| `nnimap-expunge-on-close'
|      Unlike Parmenides the IMAP designers have decided things that
|      don't exist actually do exist.  More specifically, IMAP has this
|      concept of marking articles `Deleted' which doesn't actually
|      delete them, and this (marking them `Deleted', that is) is what
|      nnimap does when you delete an article in Gnus (with `B DEL' or
|      similar).
| 
|      Since the articles aren't really removed when we mark them with the
|      `Deleted' flag we'll need a way to actually delete them.  Feel like
|      running in circles yet?
| 
|      Traditionally, nnimap has removed all articles marked as `Deleted'
|      when closing a mailbox but this is now configurable by this server
|      variable.
| 
|      The possible options are:
| 
|     `always'
|           The default behavior, delete all articles marked as "Deleted"
|           when closing a mailbox.
| 
|     `never'
|           Never actually delete articles.  Currently there is no way of
|           showing the articles marked for deletion in nnimap, but other
|           IMAP clients may allow you to do this.  If you ever want to
|           run the EXPUNGE command manually, *Note Expunging mailboxes::.
| 
|     `ask'
|           When closing mailboxes, nnimap will ask if you wish to
|           expunge deleted articles or not.
`----

Bye,
Tassilo

Re: really deleting an nnimap message

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:56:25 -0700 (PDT) marklar <markprice@gmail.com> wrote: 

m> However, I do find that the message is being stored in ~/News/agent/
m> nnimap/myaccount/INBOX

m> When I say that the message is being stored, I just mean that there a
m> record of the email in ~/News/agent/nnimap/myaccount/INBOX/.overview
m> that is being used to display the message in the summary buffer.

m> When I press enter to read the message, it gets marked with a G, and
m> the body is not displayed, given that it's not stored on the server.
m> When I try to delete the message with B-del, it tells me that the
m> article can't be deleted.

Maybe you can try turning off the Gnus Agent.  It sounds like that's the
problem.

For a foreign server: from the group buffer, press `^' to enter the
server buffer.  Use the Agent menu in the toolbar to turn off the agent
for the particular server.

For a native (defined in your .gnus.el file) server: edit the definition
to turn off the agent.

Ted

Re: really deleting an nnimap message

[marklar]

On Apr 21, 11:55 am, Ted Zlatanov <t...@lifelogs.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:56:25 -0700 (PDT) marklar <markpr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> m> However, I do find that the message is being stored in ~/News/agent/
> m> nnimap/myaccount/INBOX
>
> m> When I say that the message is being stored, I just mean that there a
> m> record of the email in ~/News/agent/nnimap/myaccount/INBOX/.overview
> m> that is being used to display the message in the summary buffer.
>
> m> When I press enter to read the message, it gets marked with a G, and
> m> the body is not displayed, given that it's not stored on the server.
> m> When I try to delete the message with B-del, it tells me that the
> m> article can't be deleted.
>
> Maybe you can try turning off the Gnus Agent.  It sounds like that's the
> problem.
>
> For a foreign server: from the group buffer, press `^' to enter the
> server buffer.  Use the Agent menu in the toolbar to turn off the agent
> for the particular server.
>
> For a native (defined in your .gnus.el file) server: edit the definition
> to turn off the agent.
>
> Ted

Ted,
I had not seen your reply when I sent my recent follow up.  This seems
to have
solved the rest of the problem.
Thanks,
Marklar

Re: really deleting an nnimap message

[marklar]

On Apr 19, 6:00 am, Tassilo Horn <tass...@member.fsf.org> wrote:
> marklar <markpr...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> Hi Marklar,
>
> > I'm using emacs22 with nnimap, and am having trouble fully deleting a
> > message.
>
> I think that's your problem:
>
> ,----[ (info "(gnus)IMAP") ]
> | `nnimap-expunge-on-close'

Thank you for the kind help, Tassilo

Adding (nnimap-expunge-on-close 'ask) seems to be mostly doing the
trick, but i'm still having
some old, deleted messages show up.  To put it more precisely,
messages that I delete are
gone, but there are a bunch of messages I moved to another folder this
morning with
B-m <folder name> that won't away.

If I do the following:
1. exit gnus, quit emacs
2. reopen emacs and start gnus
3. enter my INBOX
4. type /o to get my old messages,
then those messages are still in the folder marked with O.  If I press
enter to view the message,
gnus marks it with G and tells me the message doesn't exist.  If I q
the folder, reenter and press /o,
the messages are gone, but if I restart emacs and use the /o command,
they are still there.

Thanks,
Marklar